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Cookies & Biscuits

Just a quick post to say that cookie control has been enabled as per the EU Cookie Directive, boo hiss.

A right pain in the arse as it means nothing to the majority of visitors to websites who hardly know anything about cookies and so can’t give informed consent. It hinders owners of websites that serve any EU resident as they try and understand the rules whilst websites elsewhere carry on without hinderance. Non-EU sites that serve the EU must also implement the cookie policy, there is no way the can be fined so they can ignore the rules.

It’s also bloody irritating as anytime you visit a site you’ll get prompted to save cookies. If you use your browser’s privacy setting (or porn mode) then you’ll keep getting asked every time you visit a site as it’ll forget your settings.

The fact that every site on the internet will start asking you means that user will also go blind to the questions and just click on them to make it go away. They will not give informed consent, they’ll just click to get rid of the annoying popup – just like the annoying adverts that pop up and block your view of the site you’re visiting.

Hopefully I’ve found an unobtrustive method which you can ignore without it affecting your visits to the blog too much if you decide not to accept our cookies. You’ll find it at the top of the page.

So that you are fully informed about our cookies, this what we use them for.

Cookies are used on this site to track your name and email address and Google uses some to track you for advertising purposes. So if you keep seeing adverts for Thai brides, it’s not my fault! If you opt out of Anna’s cookies (why would you, they’re very tasty) then you’ll have to keep entering your name when commenting. Your email address is used by Gravatar to display either a nice picture or one of those funny symetrical symbols. Your IP address is noted when you access the blog, so that we can bar you if you upset the rest of our customers. Statcounter is also used so that we can see how popular posts are, where people are coming from and how people are finding the blog.

If you want to see the content of the cookies we keep, in FireFox select options, then in the window that appears select the privacy tab and click the “remove individual cookies” link; enter “annaraccoon.com” in the search field. In Chrome click the spanner, then settings, scroll to the bottom of the page and click advanced, then select privacy. Now click the content settings button followed by “all cookies and site data”. Enter “annaraccoon.com” in the search field.

More redtape and beaucracy for no real benefit – as is usual for the EU.

It’s a pain in the arse for those of us who regularly delete cookies. For example, the BBC keep giving me their cookie directive message, and if they’d done the decent thing and set the default to ‘minimum required’, I’d have no problem with that. Instead, they assume everything at 11 and I have to go turn it down. It would make sense to do it that way because they al store the preferences in a cookie, so those who delete the things get it re-installed, whereas if the absence of a cookie meant “minimum only”, it would be better. Opt-in, not opt-out.

I thought that too. I thought that because we are hosted somewhere in the USA that we could ignore the law. But I was wrong. It’s not the hosting it’s the viewing that it the key point.

It seems that the law is aimed at any website anywhere in the world which aims itself at readers of an EU member state. So I could create a website here in the UK designed to be read only by Americans and I wouldn’t have to put the cookie monster in. But websites in the US aimed at UK viewers can still ignore the law because they are outside the jurisdiction of the EU.